Theoretical part: measurement of process performance in quality management system according to ISO 9001 Applied part: description of agency, processes, current BSC methodology, suggested new BSC methodology according to new strategy

La tesi affronta il tema dell’utilizzo delle informazioni in ambito pubblico sulla scia di quanto avviato dalle teorie di (bounded) rationality, e di diversi filoni di (public) management che si sono occupati nel tempo di indagare i meccanismi attraverso i quali le informazioni vengono identificate, selezionate e utilizzate nei processi decisionali. Attraverso l’analisi delle politiche sociali nei comuni italiani, la tesi si occupa di indagare tre specifiche situazioni: la presentazione delle strategie e politiche pubbliche; la costruzione di piani strategici; la risoluzione di situazioni critiche e di trade-off complessi. La tesi mostra che le informazioni sono usate per presentare le decisioni tramite meccanismi di razionalità ed altri legati alla creazione di consenso per l’innovazione dei contenuti, governance e contesto di riferimento delle politiche sociali. Nella pianificazione strategica le informazioni vengono spesso solamente raccolte oppure utilizzate in modo strumentale. Nel caso di situazioni complesse e caratterizzate da trade-off, le informazioni di accounting hanno sia una valenza manageriale che politica di costruzione del consenso e delle motivazioni ad agire. / The PhD thesis deals with the issue of information use in the public sector. Building on (bounded) rationality theories and (public) management studies focusing on mechanisms through which information is identified, gathered and used in decision making processes, the thesis analysed what happens in Italian Municipalities, in the field of social care policies. Three different situations are analysed: public presentation of social care policies; social care strategic plans; wicked problems resolutions and trade off discussion. The thesis shows that information is used to present public strategies through rationality or by building consensus towards innovation in contents, governance and context of social care policies. In the case of strategic plans, information is often only presented or used instrumentally. In the case of trade-offs and wicked situation information is used both in a managerial perspective and in a political fashion so to build consensus and motivation for action.

I den här fallstudien undersöks hur undervisningskvaliteten inom högre utbildning påverkas av ett prestationsbaserat resursfördelningssystem vid Luleå tekniska universitet. Författarna har även undersökt under vilka förutsättningar undervisningen kan få högre (lägre) kvalitet vid en tilldelning av större (mindre) ekonomiska resurser. Som grund till denna studie ligger den kritik som det befintliga systemet har fått och Regeringens vision att ta fram ett nytt resursfördelningssystem för högre utbildning. Enligt dagens system fördelas delar av ersättningen till universitet baserat på hur många studenter som examineras och godkänns på kurser och utbildningsprogram. Teorierna i studien baseras på Simons modell över styrningens hävstänger, strategisk styrning, professionsteori samt prestationsbaserad styrning för att få en djupare förståelse kring ämnet. Det insamlade materialet bestod av kvalitativa intervjuer med lärare på universitetet och med lärarnas uppfattning i fokus. Resultatet av studien indikerar att undervisningskvaliteten inom högre utbildning inte påverkas i någon nämnvärd utsträckning av ett prestationsbaserat resursfördelningssystem. Det ligger inte i lärares natur att manipulera resultat i ett ekonomiskt syfte vilket kan förklaras av yrkesstoltheten inom deras profession. Vidare kan en förutsättning för att en större tilldelning ekonomiska resurser kan leda till högre kvalitet i undervisningen, vara att lärare inte ska behöva arbeta på fritiden i lika stor utsträckning. Lärares återhämtning är viktig och kan på lång sikt påverka kvaliteten i undervisningen. För vidare forskning föreslår författarna en större undersökning omfattande flera universitet. Det för att möjliggöra jämförelse och för att få en mer generell uppfattning om hur undervisningskvaliteten påverkas av ett prestationsbaserat resursfördelningssystem.

Depuis les années 2000, la France a mis en place d'importantes politiques de réformes de l'Etat. Ayant pour ambition affichée de moderniser la gestion de l'Etat en le recentrant sur ses missions prioritaires comme améliorer le service rendu à l'usager et réduire les dépenses publiques, ces réformes ont des répercussions sur l'ensemble des acteurs, et notamment sur les cadres de proximité. Pris en tenaille entre leur hiérarchie qui fixe des objectifs de performance et leur équipe qui « fait » le travail, ces cadres traduisent au quotidien les objectifs en missions concrètes.Dans le but de mieux comprendre cette posture d'équilibriste et ses conséquences sur l'activité et la santé des cadres, cette thèse s'intéresse à l'activité des cadres de proximité de la Direction Générale des Finances Publiques (DGFiP), créée en 2008 et qui s'inscrit dans la ligne du New Public Management. Ces cadres A encadrants sont issus des deux anciennes filières distinguées avant la fusion, et dont les cultures respectives diffèrent au niveau de l'approche du pilotage par la performance et de la relation aux agents. Dans une administration en changement permanent, ils sont tiraillés par des injonctions contradictoires, qui remettent continuellement en question leur positionnement vis-à-vis de la hiérarchie versus équipe encadrée, des objectifs de performance versus conditions de vie au travail, des logiques managériales versus logiques de technicité du métier. Un détour par la littérature pluridisciplinaire (sciences de gestion, sociologie, psychologie), abondante notamment sur le rôle et le positionnement des cadres de proximité, pointe pourtant un creux sur le contenu-même de ce travail. En ergonomie, les quelques recherches sur le travail des cadres de proximité s'intéressent plutôt à l'analyse des situations de travail. Nous proposons pour notre part d'analyser cette activité sous le prisme des parcours professionnels au sens de Gaudart & Ledoux (2013), c'est-à-dire comme une succession d'emplois ou de fonctions d'une part, et d'autre part un parcours de travail entendu comme un accroissement du temps vécu (Molinié, Gaudart & Pueyo, 2012) pointant les rôles de l'expérience. Notre objectif est de comprendre à la fois comment les transformations du travail impactent l'activité des cadres de proximité et en quoi l'expérience peut être une ressource dans la réalisation de cette activité, notamment vis-à-vis de la régulation du couple distances/proximités par ces cadres.Notre stratégie de recherche combine cinq méthodes : l'analyse d'un dispositif existant dénommé « espace de dialogue » et de ses contenus ; des entretiens notamment de reconstitution des parcours professionnels et sur le dialogue de gestion ; des observations de l'activité de 14 cadres de proximité ; des auto-confrontations à partir des traces de l'activité ; et l'organisation d'ateliers réflexifs. / Since the 2000s, France set up important policies of State reforms. The aim of these reforms is to modernize the French State management by refocusing this one on its missions' priority as to improve the service provided to the user and to reduce the public spending. These reforms have repercussions on all the actors, in particular on the first-line managers. Between their hierarchy which sets goals of performance and their teams which “do” the work, these first-line managers translate day-to-day the objectives into concrete missions.In order to understand this balanced posture and its consequences on the activity and on the health of managers, this thesis is interested in the activity of the Head office of the Public finances' first-line managers. This administration was created in 2008 and joins in the line of New Public Management. This kind of managers is from the two former sectors which existed before the merger: the respective cultures differ in the approach of performance-based management and the relation to the agents. In an administration in permanent change, the first-line managers are pulled by contradictory orders. This kind of orders questions constantly the positioning towards the hierarchy and supervised team, towards objectives of performance and living conditions at work, towards logics of technical skill and managerial logics. Although the multidisciplinary literature – sciences of management, sociology, psychology – is extensive in particular on the role and the positioning of the first-line managers, the contents of their work are few approached. In ergonomics, some researches on the work of the first-line managers are rather interested in the analysis of working situations. For our part, we suggest analyzing this activity under the prism of the careers (Gaudart & Ledoux, 2013). These careers represent a succession of jobs or functions and a working course with an increase of real-life time (Molinié, Gaudart & Pueyo, 2012) which points at the experience's roles. Our two objectives are to understand how the work transformations impact on the first-line managers' activity and how the experience can be a resource to realize this activity, in particular to regulate the couple closeness / distances by these managers.Our strategy of research combines five methods: the analysis of an existing “space of dialogue” plan and its contents, interviews of the careers' reconstruction, observations of the 14 managers' activity, auto-confrontations from the tracks of the activity, and the organization of reflexive workshops.

The master's thesis deals with application of Management Control System methods, described in theoretical part of the thesis. In analytical part, those methods are used for comparison of planned performance of individual trucks in the transport company with real performance of those trucks in year 2017. Detected deviations from the plan are further analysed, in order to identify their sources and to formulate corrective measures to eliminate them. This knowledge is put to use in the proposal part, in order to create plan for year 2018, which takes into account established facts and corrective measures from previous year. Finally, part of the plan for year 2018 is compared with real data collected by the company in that period, in order to assess the plan’s accuracy, identify deviations from the plan and their sources.

This master's thesis deals with the evaluation of performance of the company BAWEL from 2007 to 2010. Based on its financial analysis and analysis of financial management and a comparison of its results with competing companies and average values in the respective branch of industry are presented proposals to maintain company performance.

The green supply chain concept occurs to mitigate environmental degradations and controlair, water and waste pollution through the adoption of green practices in manufacturing andbusiness operations. The essential ideology behind green concept is to enhance environmental sustainability. This can be through some reviews which can be done on some previous studies, articles or /and papers which includes within its concept caring about the environmental issues. Since the environmental issues are increasing concerning the green supply chain a researchabout the actual supply chain performance and its greening in an integrated environmental management system (EMS) is required to be done. This will be shown in this research. As well as the SC is shown to be driven to ISO 14001 to meet the requirements of life cycle incombination with design and development. A modified model of EMS is suggested aftergreening the SC. It is of great importance to green the SC to come till the objective of this thesis. That is tosatisfy the customer by greening the SC and to modify an EMS which includes practisinggreening the supply chain (SC), certain themes should be studied. Firstly, description of someconcepts related to the topic of this research will be forwarded. The definitions of the SC, SCM and how together they integrate in environmental thinking will be clarified in the first hand.This will simplify the comprehensive of greening SC/SCM in an EMS. The green supply chain(GSC) can reduce the environmental pollution and production costs and it can also balance theeconomic process, create competitive advantage in terms of greater customer satisfaction, positive image and reputation. In this research the SC is also to be driven to ISO 14001, the standardization regarding theenvironmental issues and its impact management. It is valuable also to mention and not to forgetthat, as general nowadays, the increase in industry greenhouse emission are considered as aserious matter that may raise the taxes regarding the emission of more carbon dioxide, whichin turn affects the environmental impacts measure. Sweden depends on the natural resourcesand is the leading producer of ores and metals such as zinc, copper andlead. People also depend on the lakes for water so there must be certain means for a continuousimprovement, a decreasing and not an increasing in the environmental impacts which may leadto pollution and contamination. This comes to reality when an environmentally friendly inputsare utilized and transformed into outputs that can be reclaimed and re-used at the end of theirlife cycle thus creating a sustainable supply chain, considering the manufacturing process from product design development, material selection, delivery to the end the life cycle managementafter the product’s useful life. Through the review of 33 papers/studies, four of these reviews are explained and will be justified here in this research. It will be shown clearly and actually that the questions of thisresearch will get an answer and the objective will be met. In another words this research focuseson the green SC with respect to product life cycle and the design development which will beshown to be a key to customer’s satisfaction. SC performance measure; i.e. quality, delivery,cost and flexibility play an essential role on that. This will be shown when an EMS is structured keeping the basis of ISO 14001 (can be the latest version: 2015). The methodology followed is the collection of data from the papers and studies, analysis oftheir results, observations of their conclusions and the comparison of the similarity and contrast of their contributions. Extra conclusion to the conclusions of the papers can be added if found. Some recommendation is given for future studies so as a continuous gain obtained while developing the studies.

After the Republic of Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008, new municipal structures were created with the charge of monitoring the delivery of health care services; yet, no mechanism for monitoring performance was ever implemented. With the public value theory as the foundation, the purpose of this multiple case study of 3 Kosovo municipalities was to understand issues surrounding the capacity of local government health department to monitor their performance related to the delivery of services. Relevant data were collected through focus-group discussions with 10 nurses, 9 directors of family medicine centers, and 12 municipal program managers. Purposeful semistructured interviews were conducted with 3 elected officials, 3 leaders of health care services, 3 policy leaders of relevant central-level ministries, and 9 participants from the national coalition of civil society organizations. All data were transcribed and coded per thematic analysis procedures. Results indicated that integrating the threefold value system of business value, social value, and governance value into municipal work plans and policy considerations will likely create a more solution-oriented service delivery at the municipal level. Furthermore, service delivery in the 3 municipalities appears to have improved over the past 5 years because of the pressure from active citizens, increased community engagement, and the institutionalization of home visits. Positive social change implications stemming from this study include the recommendation to central and local policy makers to fully integrate performance-based reporting systems into local legislation and policies. Such efforts can result in sustainable, equitable, and inclusive development, leading to stability and prosperity in Kosovo.

Efficient discovery of frequent itemsets in large datasets is a key component of many data mining tasks. In-core algorithms---which operate entirely in main memory and avoid expensive disk accesses---and in particular the prefix tree-based algorithm FP-growth are generally among the most efficient of the available algorithms. Unfortunately, their excessive memory requirements render them inapplicable for large datasets with many distinct items and/or itemsets of high cardinality. To overcome this limitation, we propose two novel data structures---the CFP-tree and the CFP-array---, which reduce memory consumption by about an order of magnitude. This allows us to process significantly larger datasets in main memory than previously possible. Our data structures are based on structural modifications of the prefix tree that increase compressability, an optimized physical representation, lightweight compression techniques, and intelligent node ordering and indexing. Experiments with both real-world and synthetic datasets show the effectiveness of our approach.

Die Arbeit befasst sich mit Methodenproblemen in der Strategischen Managementforschung. Auf Basis einer Meta-Analyse zum Zusammenhang zwischen Ressourcen im Sinne des Resource-based view und der Performance von Unternehmen werden verschiedene Erklärungen für die zu beobachtende Ergebnisheterogenität in den Primärstudien empirisch gegenübergestellt. Es kann gezeigt werden, dass die Operationalisierung des Konstrukts "organisationale Leistung" den größten Beitrag zur Erklärung der Varianz der Studienergebnisse erbringt. Die Appropriationstheorie liefert einen überzeugenden Erklärungsansatz zum systematischen Zusammenhang zwischen Leistung und Studienergebnissen.:1. Einleitung 1 1.1 Problemstellung 1 1.2 Forschungsfragen, zentrales Erkenntnisinteresse, Aufbau und Einordnung 5 2. Grundlagen 8 2.1 Die Rolle von Theorie, Empirie und Hypothese in der Wissensgenerierung 8 2.2 Der Leistungsbegriff 19 2.3 Strategische Managementforschung 25 2.4 Zwischenfazit 30 3. Theoriegeleitete Analyse 33 3.1 Überblick 33 3.2 Das Problem der Populationsselektion 34 3.3 Das Appropriationsproblem 44 3.4 Das Time-Lag Problem 70 4 Qualitative Literaturreview 77 4.1 Forschungsansatz 77 4.2 Ergebnisse 89 4.3 Diskussion 96 5. Metaanalyse 99 5.1 Forschungsansatz 99 5.2 Hypothesenentwicklung 103 5.3 Daten und Operationalisierung 106 5.4 Analyse 113 5.5 Diskussion der Ergebnisse 141 5.6 Abgrenzung und Limitationen 153 6. Zusammenführung und Diskussion 157 6.1 Zusammenfassung der Kernergebnisse 157 6.2 Diskussion und Ausblick 165 Anhänge 174 / The dissertation thesis contrasts various explanations for heterogeneity in strategic management research findings using meta-analytical techniques. I evaluate research results for a well-known research questions in strategic management research, the relation between performance and resources in the framework of resource-based view, and find that the way how the construct ‘performance’ is being operationalized explains a significant part of the observed heterogeneity in research findings, distinctly more than problems like population selection or the unclear temporal link between dependent and independent variables. Appropriation theory is shown to provide a convincing explanation for the observed outcome.:1. Einleitung 1 1.1 Problemstellung 1 1.2 Forschungsfragen, zentrales Erkenntnisinteresse, Aufbau und Einordnung 5 2. Grundlagen 8 2.1 Die Rolle von Theorie, Empirie und Hypothese in der Wissensgenerierung 8 2.2 Der Leistungsbegriff 19 2.3 Strategische Managementforschung 25 2.4 Zwischenfazit 30 3. Theoriegeleitete Analyse 33 3.1 Überblick 33 3.2 Das Problem der Populationsselektion 34 3.3 Das Appropriationsproblem 44 3.4 Das Time-Lag Problem 70 4 Qualitative Literaturreview 77 4.1 Forschungsansatz 77 4.2 Ergebnisse 89 4.3 Diskussion 96 5. Metaanalyse 99 5.1 Forschungsansatz 99 5.2 Hypothesenentwicklung 103 5.3 Daten und Operationalisierung 106 5.4 Analyse 113 5.5 Diskussion der Ergebnisse 141 5.6 Abgrenzung und Limitationen 153 6. Zusammenführung und Diskussion 157 6.1 Zusammenfassung der Kernergebnisse 157 6.2 Diskussion und Ausblick 165 Anhänge 174